The Beast and His Beauty
by AutumnPromises
Summary: They'd been torn apart and their hearts had been broken, and yet in his seclusion he still loved her... but really, who could ever love the beast? HUDDY Disney's Beauty & the Beast. Based off of Pokeitlikejello's masterpiece.
1. Author

**Author's Note**

**Please View**

thank you for viewing my story. this is simply a brief notice that you must read before you go on.

this story is based off of "Beauty and the Beast" by Disney. the idea to bring this story to life is full credited to pokeitlikejello and their story named "Tale As Old As Time".

pokeitlikejello's profile = .net/u/204243/

pokeitlikejello's original story "Tale As Old As Time" = .net/s/4323650/1/Tale_As_Old_As_Time

this story will have beasts, humans that aren't quite what they may seem to be, and beautiful women that stray away from reality for just a moment...

and find themselves lost in a paradox of impossibility.

you have been warned.

disclaimer –

i do not own Beauty and the Beast. i do not own House M.D. i do not own the original skeleton for this story.

Disney, David Shore & Katie Jacobs, pokeitlikejello.

wishes,

autumnpromises.


	2. Prologue

Often, reality and possibility blend into one another until we can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins. Impossibility is a myth because, after all, if we dare to reach that high, we're likely to fall and shatter and that just wouldn't accomplish anything, so we stay on the ground where birds soar for us, and that's usually enough.

It would have never made sense, then, for the crippled man to contradict everything and redefine life as we know it.

It also wouldn't make much sense if that crippled man feasted on answers and the humility of others, and he had the single most defying puzzle the world has ever known, and yet all he wanted was to not have it... because maybe, in the end, he realized that the high of `being right` wasn't that great at all. Maybe, her whisper was more enticing than the praise of old and young, (maybe her breath across his chest rocked him in the deepest throes of love more than the truth ever could.)

No, that wouldn't make sense at all.

Yet... it would be slightly more sane to say that he was ripped apart from the inside out and when all he had was a hollow coating of that crippled man and the memory of her lust, he thrived on the only other lover he had ever know.

The brilliance that, despite everything else, he wasn't wrong.

... Until one day, there just wasn't an answer; and that's the day he thought he had died.

Little did he know, the nightmare was just beginning.

**. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .**

Smoke billowed around her in large mushroomgusts and Foreman's hand was on the small of her back, a forceful guide to safety. She had her black blouse pulled up and covering her face from the charcoal ash and yet she still hacked a morbid string of coughs into her palm.

It had all happened so _fast_ because she'd barely had time to see House disappear into the elevator and then it was silent for two beats before an explosion erupted around her and shrieks pierced the low drum of destruction.

Concrete screeching against itself rumbled from the walls and she had just stood there, completely stunned, because she could have sworn that sound just hadn't existed for those two seconds when the ticking of the bomb tauntingly clicked away lives, happiness, and her hospital.

_Tick. Tick._

Boom.

"_Cuddy!_" She jerked back to reality with the sudden realization that she almost fainted from the smoke toxicities in the air, and she realized that Foreman was screaming into her ear and trying to hold her up and half drag her out of the doors because it was _that bad_.

She thought they were going to die, and she swore that half of her already had.

They passed a corpse that had been thrown back from the impact laying on the blasted glass of a large window, and with a shiver of startling reality, she kicked off her heels and she ran with the neurologist into the parking lot where the blaze of police and ambulances and fire trucks shrilled into the chaos.

Everything moved in slow clarity and she turned, her hair whipping across her face as the first floor collapsed and the front of the second floor followed it.

"Oh my god." She breathed, and her voice sounded torn to her own denying ears. And then everything was there in front of her, and she lost that carefully built facade. "_Oh my god!_" She cried in anguish and her eyes melted with a salty stream of tears that smudged her mascara from her stinging eyes.

"_No, no, no..._ She chanted a disbelief like a sonnet, as if repeating it would reverse everything, and she collapsed onto the concrete. Foreman was there beside her, shaking his head and his eyes were red with repressed shock, and they didn't even acknowledge each other.

Because, they realized, that lives had been lost. Lives of their friends, co-workers, patients...

All lost in mere seconds. She still didn't quite _understand_...

And then she realized with a white-hot stark fear, (while the sounds of crime and death blared in the background), that the ticking had started in the elevator.

The elevator that House had gotten on.

Oh god. She was dieing while her heart ticked unblemished and healthy in her chest.

_Tick, tick, tick_...

**. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .**

**this is the first chapter to my story. it's more like a prologue. actually, it is a prologue. it's how house-being-the-beast starts, (or **_**my**_** idea of how it starts, as it were.)**

**hm. this story is going to be unrealistic and fantasy-ish in a realistic way. does that make sense? perhaps it makes more sense to say that the contents of this story will be unrealistic, as in impossible in real life, but they will be presented in a realistic style.**

**better.**

**the idea goes to Pokeitlikejello. go read her story "Tale As Old As Time". this Beauty and the Beast/House M.D is her idea. go praise her.**


	3. ONE

The winter wind nipped at her rosy cheeks and gloveless fingers and she stood, completely solitary, in the middle of a white-blanketed parking lot of virgin snow. Ashy flakes fluttered around her and caressed the destruction.

The area seemed so much darker than everywhere else, like it was cloaked in a shadow of remorse, and it breathed quietly in it's death. Stray beams of concrete crumbled at the entrance to her hospital and bricks had fallen to dust.

Lisa Cuddy stiffled a sob and her hand came up to delicately cover her mouth because everything, from the silence to the ache, seemed so _new_ and raw, even though it had been three years ago.

Three years ago that week.

Still, though, she had no idea what exactly possessed her to even come. It was like there was a persistent pull at the back of her heart, pulling her away from everything and everybody and bringing her _here_, where she'd left everything behind in the rubble.

Everything except him. A fresh round of tears flowed down her cheeks and her barrette and long P-coat weren't keeping her warm In the bushes, she heard a faint stir of dead branches and she looked towards the dark side of the street only to see nothing. She shrugged it off and wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

It physically hurt her to be so far away, she realized, and now that she stood at the brim of it all, the pain was dull and just a quiet hum in the back of her ribcage.

His warm hands still stroked her hips and brushed the hair out of her eyes, and he still seemed to whisper `mine` against her ear... and then she realized that it was just the wind, trying to torture her and make her remember what had been taken away.

Cuddy wasn't really sure how long she stood there in the blackness, or how long she reflected on that particular pain right in the center of her heart, but eventually she heard the engine of a car rumbling and then purring in the background. A car door slammed and then boots crunched in the snow before a warm arm wrapped itself around her shoulders.

"Hey, Lisa. It's okay, it's alright. I've found you." Leonardo was there. She'd forgotten that she'd left without a word. "Come on." He gently pulled her under his chest and kissed her cheek before steering her towards the taxi.

With every step, that stinging throb racked through Cuddy's body and she shivered, but it wasn't from the night. She just bit her lip and sucked it in because the best doctors (except him) had concluded that there wasn't anything (physically) wrong with her.

But, when she leaned back against the shoulder of Leo (his shoulder was too sloped and too soft to be the one she was dreaming of), a longing told her that she was heading in the wrong direction...

Away from him, towards that constant ripping that just didn't make sense and that wouldn't go away.

.

.

.

Allison Cameron barreled down the hallway, a plastic bag swung over her shoulder, her porcelain feet clinking delicately on the marble. She swung between lances of moonlight that reflected off of her body, and she swore that she was smacking her feet so hard down the hallway, that she heard a couple of glass cracks between her toes. She ignored the pain.

Cameron reached out and caught the edge of the door with one hand and let it absorb her momentum while she swung into the room and threw the bag into the middle of them, all huddled around a deck of cards.

"Go fish." House muttered and set down his cards to look at the bag. "Oh goody! You got the chips!" Greedily, he pawed through the bag before he found the Doritos. He licked his lips theatrically before ripping them open.

Wilson, too, with his pendulum eyeless eyes that swung back and fourth hypnotizingly, flung his cards into the circle and looked up with a grin. It looked kind of eerie without any actual pupils. "`Welcome back, Cameron. It took you two hours and fourteen minutes to get `em." And then he frowned, "What took you so long?"

Chase, who flared a strong amber glow and heat into the room, raised a brow at her breathlessness.

"You'll never –_gasp_- believe who I –_gasp-_ just saw—"

"Dora the Explorer!" House called enthusiastically before grunting. "Bye." For a moment, he just sat there, and a flicker of something flashed through his cobalt eyes. He glanced at them, as if to check if they had noticed anything, and then abruptly stood, caneless, and walked with a feline grace to the door before disappearing into the shadows without even a murmur of goodbye.

"I bet he's taking a nap." Wilson rolled his eyes (or rather twitched his face into an expression that seemed as if he was rolling his eyes) as if he was sharing a joke with them.

In the distance, they heard the sickening pop and crackle of his bones constricting and rearranging. Chase shifted uncomfortably.

"That's- it doesn't- I just _saw Cuddy_!" Cameron's perfectly chiseled hands splayed in front of her and her mouth remained open with the last syllable to express her excitement. "She was just... _there_, just standing there! And she was looking at the hospital and I swear she almost saw me... and then—"

"Wait wait wait. You _saw_ Cuddy. As in, Lisa Cuddy?" Chase exclaimed, and he felt sort of odd using her first name. Cameron, on the other hand, was getting pretty impatient with being interrupted.

Wilson's brows were pulled together in confusion and he leaned back on his palms. "Wait- _huh_? How- what happened?"

And so Cameron sat, indian-styled, and she told them. "I was just bringing back the food and I took the back way because after the last time that dog almost saw me..." She paused, and it was barely recognizable, but they all noticed it and the word hung between them for a moment. _Dog_. "And she was crying." Her voice lowered into a whisper, because this was the deepest blasphemy, to go talking about his Lisa like this.

They never saw him like _that_, and they barely spoke to him, but he tried so damn hard to keep things as normal as they could possibly be... but sometimes, when midnight was dawning, Wilson would yawn and Chase and Cameron would follow him up the staircase and they'd each go to their rooms, and in a sliver of moonlight, they'd see the scruffy tip of a tail flow along behind it's owner, or they'd hear the haunting clacking of claws against the tiled floor.

House's room was draped with pitch-black blankets that fell behind the glass and completely obscured his old office, and the only one of them that had ever been in it was Wilson. Wilson, however, wasn't to have _supposed_ to have been there, and House was never told, but the oncologist suspected (after a dirty glare from House) that he knew anyways.

Wilson had said that the very idea of being in that secluded area, the idea of being so close to a beast that didn't know it's space was being invaded, was frightening... even though it was House, and they were best friends.

And sometimes knowing who it was heavily snoring in the corner made the strike of fear worse.

Wilson now gaped alongside Chase, and silence fell on the trio.

Quietly, Cameron folded her legs beneath her and leaned against Chase, and they all stared off into the distance.

And then the deep baritone of his cry echoed through the abandoned building and drifted along the shadows before slowly fading into nothing... and then a chorus of harsh, chopped growls followed.

They'd heard it once. Two months before, to be exact.

It was the sound of him crying out in pain.

"Oh god." Wilson murmured.

.

.

.

House lay there, sprawled across the floor, his ribcage heaving beneath gorgeously strung and _powerful_ muscles that rippled along silver fur; the type of silver that is the reflection of the moon in a puddle, or a shadow of a shadow. He was gorgeous and feral, and just the type of superior he had craved.

But God, he was pathetic. He had collapsed right in front of his room... office... cave... and hadn't even managed to make it in, because if he had, he wouldn't have heard the pounding of Wilson's feet coming along the corridors, (Wilson wouldn't dare come into his room. It smelt of musk and rain and he wouldn't have been able to see the hand in front of his face anyways.)

"House!" For a moment, Wilson was stunned, because lying there before him was the grand and large body of the animal behind House's cerulean eyes, but he swallowed it all back and kneeled beside him.

Wilson froze as House continued to whimper, a wet red tongue coming out to pant against his mug.

Then, against his primal instincts, he stroked the shoulder blade of the magnificent creature. "What's wrong?"

A strangled wheezing came from the wolf's throat. "Pain... _pain_..."

"It's okay... it's okay..." Awkwardly, the best friend sat beside him. "Is it bad?"

"It was gone..."

Wilson gasped. "What?" So many surprises today and so little time to process everything.

"And now... it's..." He never finished, because suddenly, a longing struck him so deep and true in his chest that he howled and curled in on himself, shuddering as the ripples of shock and need shot through him. He ignored the cringing Wilson beside him because it felt as if he was being burnt from the inside out, and he just couldn't quench the fire.

Wilson flinched at the high pitch of the sound, but decided not to tell the mourning beast that his pain had ended and stopped... at the arrival and departure of one Doctor Lisa Cuddy.

House's tail whipped at the floor in a beat, and he grunted in an effort to stop being such a wimp, but... Something was... wrong... and there was that constant ripping again, the constant ripping that didn't make sense and just wouldn't go away.

.

.

.

**end of chapter one.**

**hm. alrighty. so, as you can see, this is part lisa cuddy and part hospital minions.**

**to explain, cameron's skin is made completely out of porcelain. she can't carry heavy things or her arms will crack, so she was out hunting for chips.**

**wilson doesn't have eyes. they are holes, almost, with swinging pendulums that never stop.**

**chase can conjure light and heat.**

**and house... can turn into a big, 4'5 (at the shoulder) wolf thing. that can talk. hurrah.**

**leonardo is cuddy's new boything. not a boyfriend, per say, but a lover. a sex buddy. whatever.**

**hum... i don't usually ask for review, because i don't find it that big of a deal, but i really need criticism. i just don't **_**like**_** it. so... tell me what didn't work. or what didn't feel right. or what did.**


	4. TWO

The door slammed shut behind Cuddy and it rang out into the silence of her house. Leonardo walked ahead of her, further into the hallway, and quietly bent down to pull off his boots before placing them perfectly straight, heels against the wall. He paused there, slightly hunched over his kneeling legs, balancing himself with a single index finger on the floor.

Cuddy leaned back against the door, palms splayed against it's smooth surface, and with a hitched breath, her head thudded back against the wood and her eyes slid closed. She had never felt so conflicted; the emotions that raged deep in her conscious, multiplied only by that physical pain in her ribcage, throbbed persistently. It hurt so much that she felt hazy, and she bit her lip as two stray tears squeezed from between her lids.

It had never been as tormenting as this. From the moment his death registered to her and let lose an insanity, it had never been so terrible. She had been able to keep it, nearly dormant, in the back of her mind after `they` had concluded that she was just in a state of shock.

And then, five nights after the search for his body had failed, she came back to her empty house and collapsed, because it was the only thing she had had enough energy left to do.

That was when she had noticed that the pain, the indescribable pain that had appeared as spontaneously as her heart had broken, ran so much deeper than just hurt. She'd been a broken toy with just the whisper of laughter to survive on, and it hadn't been enough.

She found it ironic that they had met at the hospital (twenty years later) because of a loss, and that was exactly how everything else had ended. Only this time, it was so much more permanent.

The type of pin-break silence that loomed over Cuddy and Leo was broken when she heard the creak of his knees as he stood, and he walked towards her. She could taste the metallic stale of her blood on her tongue from where her teeth had impaled the skin of her lip.

Cuddy held her breath for two heartbeats before a gentle caress ghosted across her cheekbone and swept behind her neck. Leonardo gently lifted her head forwards, and her eyes fluttered open, the array of ethereal smoky blue and inky pain etching a history too intricate to ignore.

They locked gazes and her lips parted, opening and closing, but not being able to drag words up from her throat. He took a step forward and gently pressed his body up against hers and slowly untwined his fingers from the roots of her silky heavy hair. She heard the sweaty stick of his palms (despite how cold it was outside, it was warm in the doorway and in the air around them) as he pressed them against the door on either side of her head, and then they were so close that she was breathing his air and their noses were just touching.

She could feel the sexual tension radiating like a poison from Leonardo's body. It seeped through her veins and brought a flush back to her cheeks, and maybe it carved the idea of something good into her mind, but that was all it was... and all it ever would be, she murmured to herself with a wistful melancholy.

Leo was strong and soft and romantic, and in his presence, she smiled sometimes. A _real_ smile; but, (as cliché as it sounded), how was she supposed to love him when she yearned for the thick, humid hot touch of another? How was she supposed to wait for a calm, affectionate reply when she expected a challenge in response to her challenge?

Nonetheless, whenever he'd find her reeling from something he could never hope to understand, he'd go to her and kiss her with a passion she only sometimes returned. Then, she'd let him into a sliver of her world, and he'd make her memory slightly less crisp for only a night, and sometimes it was enough.

She had learned long ago that you could never rely on any one thing except the fact that sometimes, you had to have the hope to try.

"Stay tonight." Her voice was deep and cracked with the intensity of her depression and tears, but he nuzzled his cheek against hers and nodded nearly imperceptibly against her.

So, she sobbed into his mouth and he all but held her up with his hands rolling down her arms. He hitched her leg over his hip and from there, the stigmatic ballad deafened her and she was blinded by the filmy fog of her tears.

.

.

.

.

House sat on a crate of unpacked, unused batteries and his feet were propped up on a box of utensils. _Why the fuck do we even _have _these?_ They used their hands like civilized freaks.

He grunted, and in all irony, he tapped the rubber tip of his cane- smooth, polished and mahogany- against the edge of the wall across from him.

He always kept it leaning against the black curtains that draped across his glass walls, right beside his stacked mattresses.

He didn't even _use_ it anymore. It was useless because, after all, now he could walk without a stitch in his step. He was silent and graceful, a fluid amongst shadows... and he liked it that way. The cane was just a small, vivid epitome of everything else. The vicodin, (which didn't work against the pain in his chest. He'd tried- the bottles were still thrown haphazardly across the top of his dead television.) the throbbing, the medicine. The love.

The only thing he had left was the puzzle. It was as if everything else had been eclipsed and he'd been given exactly what he had always asked for (he suspected that he'd been cheated. The puzzle wasn't the only thing that he had wanted.)- a life stripped of feeling, (no winter wind bit at his knuckles and no ocean air would whip across his face) and want.

He didn't want anything except to not have what he had craved. He could almost visualize the smirk life would give him. _Take that, you piece of chicken shit!_

The doors quietly squealed open, dipping into the serene silence that had fallen across House's thoughts and Wilson stepped into the blackness, almost completely swallowed except for his silhouette that jutted out against the rectangular boxes of supplies. "House?" He murmured hesitantly, and House tipped his chin down to hide his smirk, though he didn't need to. Wilson was as good as blind in this dark.

"Uh... House?" His voice rose several octaves of confidence and he stepped further into the room. House chuckled darkly to himself and he could almost feel the uncertainty radiating off of his best friend. They had never learned to completely trust him, not after he had nearly decapitated Chase during the second week.

House dropped his cane and it clattered loudly to the floor, but he pulled back from the sound and observed what the oncologist's reaction would be. Wilson's hand fluttered warily up and he rubbed the back of his neck in stress, and he uttered a sigh. "House, where are you?" He was still tense and slightly jumpy, but fine nonetheless.

He was the one who trusted House the most, he knew.

With the elegance of an animal on the prowl, House materialized not three feet from Wilson and with a flourish of his hand, he bowed theatrically. "At your service, master." He drawled.

"Oh god!" Wilson jumped and his hands came up to stretch across the lines of his face. "You have _got_ to stop doing that."

"It's so much fun to see you piss your pants, it really is." He strolled back over to where he had been sitting before and picked up his cane, leaning against the wall, the cane anchored in front of his legs that were crossed at the ankle. Wilson, with a barely perceptible shrug of submission and another sigh, slowly walked clumsily after the presence of House. He lightly bumped into a box full of more boxes before finding his way.

House knocked the wooden handle of his cane in rhythm against the crate of batteries and it echoed a hollow, sudden sound. Wilson leaned against the wall opposite him.

Neither of them spoke for several moments.

House puffed out his cheeks and contemplated what to say. It wasn't very common that they'd be like they used to, with their talks. Wilson would be his conscience and House would pretend to ignore everything that he'd say, but secretly digest every sentence and analyze it over and over, and over.

Because Wilson was his common sense. Not anymore, though. Not as often.

House would go off and jeopardize everything that was anything anymore. He'd eclipse them for weeks at a time and only appear to gruffly collect the supplies they gathered before disappearing again. Sometimes piano music would melt into the chasm that wasn't him, and sometimes they'd hear the thump of a large tennis ball against the wall in an operation room or against the unplugged fridge of the doctor's lounge.

Abruptly, he spoke. "Cameron represents innocence, or arrogance, which is stupidity or cluelessness." He exhaled deeply and paused for a moment, waiting for Wilson to arch an eyebrow and part his lips but not say anything. "Chase is survival, or preservation... and you are time, or amount of time." His voice was quiet and raspy, almost like he was afraid to disturb the balance of his sanity.

He stared off into nothing and his eyes were drawn downwards in an invisible reverie. "We're surviving, but just barely. We're surviving for something... but we don't know _what_, or anything. And time is going, because we..." he stumbled over his thoughts, "I..." he continued, almost resignedly, "have not figured out what any of it is. If it means _fucking_ anything." House spit with revulsion and screwed his fists up until they were quivering power.

Wilson remained silent before supportingly replying, even though he had no idea as to how to react, "Maybe we shouldn't worry about why or how this is happening," neither of them missed how he said plural instead of just House, "but we should be wondering what to do about it..."

Wilson was just as calm as he'd ever been in any similar situation, despite the fact that his best friend could transform into a wolf thing and eat him if it... he... wanted, but there was almost an urgency behind the way they conversed, like they knew not how much time they had, but just that it was running out.

House just remained quiet, contemplating, but he loosened and his shoulders rolled down his back. He frowned.

"Quit being my humanity. Maybe I _want_ to be a five foot lumbering beast!" He exclaimed in fake insult and glared at Wilson, who just laughed through his nose, humoring him.

"Want to go play Monopoly?" Wilson offered softly, and placed a hand on House's shoulder, to gesture his friendship as much as it was a stiff understanding.

"I can't believe you'd tried to demote me to stealing fake money from you." House walked by him anyways and Wilson followed quickly after, sure to follow his path so as to not trip over a box of battery-powered toothbrushes.

It was almost normal, they way they'd walk from the placid dark storage room and into the moonlight-lighted halls to go play a board game. It was almost normal, they realized, how easy it was, amongst the chaos of their unjustifiable existences...

if it wasn't for the looming feeling that they really did have nothing, and House had twice as less.

.

.

.

hm. so, this basically explains what each character (besides House) symbolizes in their messed-up storyline.

to clarify, wilson and cameron and chase are extremely wary of house because he is dangerous, and he doesn't let them forget it, but he is house, so they trust him to a degree. for example, they trust him with their lives... they just don't trust him to not try to kill one of them in the process.

they are all friends, though, because honestly- you can't not be relatively close with people who are doomed with you for however long.

also, wilson is hesitant to surprise or be surprised by house, but they are comfortable with each other most of the time, and they are still best buddies. wilson knows him the best.

**if you took the time to read, take the time to review. i need to know what you all thinks is good, and what isn't. (i don't want compliments that aren't true.) i read every single one, regardless of if i reply or not.**


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